Introduction to Workload Identity

Teleport Workload Identity securely issues short-lived cryptographic identities to workloads. It is a flexible foundation for workload identity across your infrastructure, creating a uniform way for your workloads to authenticate regardless of where they are running.

The flexible nature of Teleport Workload Identity enables it to be used for a range of purposes, including:

• Workload authentication to third-party APIs on cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP and Azure.
• Providing X.509 certificates for mutual TLS authentication between workloads within your infrastructure as part of a Zero Trust strategy.
• Workload authentication between services within your infrastructure.

Teleport Workload Identity is compatible with the open-source Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone (SPIFFE) standard. This enables interoperability between workload identity implementations and also provides a wealth of off-the-shelf tools and SDKs to simplify integration with your workloads.

There's a whole host of benefits to adopting Teleport Workload Identity, but here's some of the key ones:

• Eliminate the use of long-lived shared secrets within your infrastructure, and reduce the risk of exfiltration and time spent by engineers creating and rotating these secrets.
• Establish an out of the box universal form of identity for your workloads, enabling your engineers to get on with building new services without needing to think about how they'll authenticate.
• Converge on a first-class form of identity for your workloads, simplifying infrastructure by reducing the number of different ways workloads authenticate.

How it works

Teleport Workload Identity establishes a root certificate authority within your Teleport cluster that will be responsible for issuing the short-lived JWTs and X509 certificates to workloads.

These identities are also known as SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Documents (SVIDs) and contain the identity of the workload encoded as a URI, also known as a SPIFFE ID. The structure of this SPIFFE ID is up to you and can encode any information you need to uniquely identify your workload.

The ability to request these identities is controlled by Teleport's Role-Based Access Control system. Users and Bots are granted roles which will allow them to request identities with specific SPIFFE IDs.

The tbot agent is installed in close proximity to workloads which require an identity. It manages the process of requesting and renewing the identities for the workloads. The tbot agent authenticates to the Teleport cluster using one of our support join methods, which in many cases enable it to authenticate on the basis of federated trust rather than the use of long-lived secrets.

Workloads can receive their identities in one of two ways:

• The tbot agent can write these identities to a directory on the local filesystem, or, to a Kubernetes secret.
• The tbot agent can expose a SPIFFE Workload API. A standardized gRPC API that allows workloads to request their identities directly from the tbot agent.

When using the Workload API, the tbot agent can perform an additional process called Workload Attestation. This allows the issuance of identities to be restricted to specific workloads. For example, you can restrict an identity to only be issued to a Linux process with a specific UID or GID, or restrict an identity to only be issued to a specific Kubernetes pod. The Workload Attestation process eliminates the need for a "bootstrapping" secret to be provided to the workloads.

Once the workload has its identity, it can be used for a range of purposes. The X.509 certificates can be used to establish Mutual TLS, and the JWTs can be used to authenticate with a range of third-party APIs.

Teleport Workload Identity vs Machine ID

Teleport Machine ID issues short-lived credentials to workloads to enable them to access resources secured by the Teleport cluster. The credentials issued are only compatible with Teleport itself, and access to resources must be through the Teleport Proxy.

Teleport Workload Identity issues cryptographic identities that are compatible with the popular SPIFFE standard for interoperable workload identity. These identities are flexible enough to be used for a range of purposes. The Teleport Proxy is not used for securing workload-to-workload communication.

Next steps

Learn more about Teleport Workload Identity:

• SPIFFE: Learn about the SPIFFE specification and how it is implemented by Teleport Workload Identity.
• Workload Attestation: Learn about using Workload Attestation to securely issue SVIDs to specific workloads.
• Federation: Learn about using Federation to allow workloads to trust workloads from other trust domains.
• Best Practices: Best practices for using Workload Identity in Production.

Learn how to configure Teleport Workload Identity for specific use-cases:

• Getting Started: How to configure Teleport for Workload Identity.
• TSH Support: How to use tsh with Workload Identity to issue SVIDs to users.
• AWS Roles Anywhere: Configuring AWS to accept Workload ID certificates as authentication using AWS Roles Anywhere.

Other resources

• SPIFFE Specification: The official SPIFFE specification. Useful for understanding the SPIFFE ID and SVID formats.
• Solving The Bottom Turtle: A book covering the fundamentals and details of SPIFFE.